Resources for Further Study:

• The Criterion or Rules by which the True Miracles Recorded in the New Testament are Distinguished from Spurious Miracles by John Douglas

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The Questioning Belief podcast explores objections to Christianity through in-depth discussions with experts. Drawing from her background as a former atheist and her experience in apologetics, Dr. Kathleen Noller invites you to explore thoughtful responses to serious questions about faith. Learn more.

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Transcript

Kathleen Noller: Welcome to the Kathleen Noller podcast, sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Institute. I’m your host, Dr. Knoller, former atheist turned Christian and biomedical scientist. Please join me as we tackle common and nuanced objections to Christianity with the help of a topical expert. Our objection today concerns miracles. I’ve written two different flavors, if you will, of objections on the subject. First, miracles are violations of the law of nature and are therefore impossible occurrences in a universe governed by those laws. Any recorded Christian miracles are either intentional fabrications or unintentionally deceptive results of the observer’s incorrect perception of a non-miraculous event, due to either physiologic dysfunction or groupthink.

A sentence or two from David Hume would correct what you said. A miracle is defined not as a part of the natural order but as a suspension of the natural order. You can't say of the Big Bang, which is the foundation of the natural order, that it's a suspension of what it starts. You may not do that. However, if you meet someone in the street whom you yesterday saw executed, you can say either that an extraordinary miracle has occurred or that you are under a very grave misapprehension. And David Hume's logic on this, I think, is quite irrefutable. He says, "What is more likely: that the laws of nature have been suspended in your favor and in a way that you approve, or that you've made a mistake?" And in each case, you must—and especially if you didn't see it yourself and you're hearing it from someone who says that they did—but I would go further and say the following. I'll grant you that it would be possible to track the pregnancy of the woman Mary, who's mentioned about three times in the Bible, and to show there was no male intervention in her life at all, but yet she delivered herself of a healthy baby boy. I don't say that's impossible. Genesis is not completely unthinkable, but it does not prove that his paternity is divine, and it wouldn't prove that any of his moral teachings were thereby correct. Nor, if I was to see him executed one day and see him walking the streets the next, would that show that his father was God or his mother was a virgin or that his teachings were true.

The second flavor concerns the reasonable reasonableness of accepting evidence for a miracle: that even if a law of nature was capable of being overridden to produce a miracle, we would never have enough testimonial evidence to outweigh the plethora of evidence we have of the natural world conforming to the laws of nature. Thus, it would be more reasonable in every case to assume a miracle did not occur.

So, joining us today to tackle these objections is Dr. Timothy McGrew. He is a professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University and specializes in epistemology, the philosophy and history of science, probability theory, and the history and philosophy of religion. His most recent book is titled Four Views on Christianity and Philosophy. Dr. McGrew authored the article on miracles for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and has spoken in universities, churches, seminaries, and engaged in many public debates on the meaning of faith, the rationality of belief in miracles, and the historical reliability of the Gospels. Welcome, Dr. McGrew.

Tim McGrew: Thank you so much, Kathleen.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you for joining us. So, I thought to begin, I thought it would be helpful for our listeners if we lay down some definitions. So first, how do you define a miracle?

Tim McGrew: So, this is a contentious point, and since you’ve asked me for my definition, I would say a simple definition of a miracle is an event that exceeds the productive power of the natural world broadly construed. So we, insofar as we are beings within the natural world, we have our powers as well, but it would exceed our powers as well as the powers of nature to produce and would therefore excite wonder if someone were to recognize that it occurred and were to know enough about the natural world to realize, “Hey, that nature can’t do this by itself.” So that would be a simple definition. It is one that is consistent with the definition offered by J.L. Mackie in his book The Miracle of Theism. Mackie, very famously an atheist philosopher at Oxford, in the very first chapter of his book tries to define a miracle and then runs through the most standard objection to belief in miracles. And this is the kind of definition that he settles on as well. So, I feel comfortable saying that I’m not begging the question by adopting Mackie’s definition.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah, so you said there is a little bit of debate as to the definition of miracle in the philosophy community. What are some other definitions and why have you not favored those?

Tim McGrew: So, some definitions would include an event brought about by the particular action of a deity. And I have not chosen to go that route, even though, as in sort of a basis for an inference, the occurrence of a miracle would seem to provide evidence for the existence of a deity. Because I want to be able to look at these things insofar as they can at first be physically determined on the factual side. Here’s the thing that occurred. Well, what were the causes of it? Let’s have a discussion of that, but we need to separate the data from the inference insofar as we’re able to do that. And so, I would rather say, “Oh, you know, here is testimony of apparent eyewitnesses with nothing to gain and much to lose saying that a man who has just been executed has come back to life and has had conversations and shared meals with them. They are his intimate friends.” It is unlikely that they are merely deceived. So, these kinds of things, you know. Then we can make inferences as to, well, what could plausibly be the cause of this, but I don’t want to build that into the definition proper.

There are other skeptical definitions. David Hume very famously simply defined a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature. Well, given Hume’s own definition of what the laws of nature are, that comes around to something that didn’t happen unless we’re just wrong about what the laws of nature are. And so, the “didn’t happen” thing is obviously question-begging vis-à-vis this discussion. And the “unless we’re wrong about the laws of nature,” it just gives him an out. So, he can say, “Oh, yeah, we might have to accept the testimony,” granting something with his right hand and then, “But then we would just revise our view of the laws of nature,” taking it back with the left.

Kathleen Noller: Yes?

Tim McGrew: So, he’s kind of got a little bit of a game going there. And I don’t want to fall into that trap, because I think that that renders it impossible for us to change our minds about these things if we are wrong. That’s a bad position to be in rationally. Nobody really should voluntarily say, “Yeah, I want to go in through the trap door and never come out again even if I am in fact wrong. I never want to know.” That’s very problematic, at least to my turn of mind. Your mileage may vary.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, that makes sense why you would not want to do that. I am wondering if your definition of a miracle—you said it doesn’t presuppose a deity—but does it presuppose the existence of a supernatural world? And how can we have conversations about miracles with materialists if these kinds of presuppositions differ so widely?

Tim McGrew: It does not presuppose the existence of an immaterial or non-natural world, but it does leave open the possibility.

Kathleen Noller: Okay.

Tim McGrew: Look, the history of science is just littered with examples of things that were not presupposed going in, but which, in the form of the evidence we eventually acquired, we were compelled to believe in: entities with fractional charges that can never be found singly; objects so literally dense that you can’t see them—what are these? These are crazy things that scarcely interact at all, only in the weakest of possible ways. We’ve got, you know, the Higgs boson and neutrinos. We don’t come in saying of these things, “Ah, well, they definitely exist. Now let’s go look for evidence for them.” And you could say, “All right, the examples that you just gave are examples of things that are, after all, at least physical possibilities. So, you haven’t really taken us outside the physical world. Quite right, I grant that. But the wider point is that we can draw these categories in a variety of ways. I can say with regard to a deity, angels, demons, what you will, “Well, if these things exist, then they are real, not material, but real.” So, can we at least leave open the possibility, again, just in the name of not foreclosing discussion on a matter of fact? This is the kind of thing where in principle it could be the case. I don’t think arguments that God’s existence is logically impossible are very plausible at all. I’ve never found those very convincing, and I think most people don’t unless they’re deep in the grip of an ideology already. But the argument that it’s implausible or that there’s no evidence for it, we can have that discussion as long as we’ve established that we’re not going to rule these things out a priori. There are a lot of things I don’t believe in that I would not rule out a priori. Aliens flying drones over New Jersey? No, I don’t believe there are aliens flying drones over New Jersey. Could I in principle be convinced of it? I think I could in principle be convinced of it. I’m not holding my breath, but you know, if you got the evidence, let’s have a conversation.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, that makes sense. And you mentioned before laws of nature and how Hume refers to a violation of the laws of nature. So how do you define the laws of nature and does your definition differ from his definition?

Tim McGrew: Right, so I would define the laws of nature as those general regularities that tell us how the natural world, broadly considered, including ourselves, behaves when it is left to itself, when it is not interfered with from outside, when the system is, as we like to say in physics, a closed system. So, the question of the causal closure of the natural world is just an extension of the very common notion in physics of the causal closure of some physical system. Frequently, we look at a physical system and we ask, “Is it insulated from external effects, or at least insulated well enough that it’s not going to mess with our margins of error?” We can ask this question about the entire physical system as well, and however much one might believe initially that, yes, that’s surely a closed system, that possibility that it is not a closed system is an open one. So, I would define the laws of nature as telling us how nature behaves when it is left to itself without prejudging the question of whether it is always or usually left to itself. That’s a separate question.

There’s some finessing to be done on the “left to itself” stuff if you’re a theist. Happy to do that. Right? I mean, there are always the people who say, “But God is in control of everything. Nothing is left to itself.” But I think we can make a distinction between general providence and special providence. One of those people, like Isaac Newton, like Robert Boyle, who believes that God set up a physical world and set up regularities and rules and it follows along those regularities, those rules, unless it is interfered with—and this is one of the reasons why we can do so much toward understanding the natural world. I mean, it’s an absolutely fascinating study. You yourself as a scientist can’t be immune to the charms of that, right? “Wow, there’s this amazing thing. Let’s find out how it works.” You know, there was a good friend of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle—some of our listeners will remember Boyle’s law from a high school physical science class—who wrote a book called The Christian Virtuoso.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: And in it, he argued that Christians of all people ought to study science, and that the person in the best position to be able to say what would count as a miracle and what would not count as a miracle should be the Christian who’s open to this evidence, who is a thoroughly informed scientist, who knows the scope and the limits of nature. Then you won’t be inclined to take something that nature can itself do without any interference as a miracle, but you also won’t be inclined to take something that nature cannot do by itself as a mundane event. And I think that Boyle was really sharp on that point, and I have no reason to abandon that point of view. I think that that’s actually a very sound approach.

Kathleen Noller: That is a very sound approach. That reminds me a little bit of—I’ve seen several miracles that have been circulated within the Protestant apologetics community, one of which is a healing miracle, not to go off topic, but one of which is a healing miracle of a woman who had multiple sclerosis. And this woman was said to go off the medication, to have prayed a lot, and then to have received healing and cessation of her symptoms. But the problem with that is if you are familiar with medicine, you know it can be a relapsing-remitting disorder and can go on and off by itself.

Tim McGrew: Right.

Kathleen Noller: So, it doesn’t really get the healing miracle, and it doesn’t really fit the criteria. So, I very much agree with Boyle there.

Tim McGrew: Yeah, and you know, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Tim McGrew: It might be. There might even be attendant circumstances that would make us think, “Oh wow, okay, that’s a really remarkable coincidence between, say, fervent, petitionary prayer, and a one-week-later X-ray showing there’s nothing there.” Okay, interesting. But when we know that these things can come and can go, I think a lot of times when we take large numbers of people who are ill, and then we try to sift through, “Oh, but maybe some of them got better,” well probably some of them were on the upward path at just about that time anyway. And so, it’s a delicate matter to try to press that into service as evidence. Could be. I have heard some interesting cases that have some attendant details that I don’t know how to sort out, but you know, both directions. I sometimes reflect to myself that I might need to get out more. I might need both to talk to more of the people who are reporting these things and to talk to more of the scientists who are specialists in remission and just sort of get more perspectives.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: And that’s fine. Nothing about being a devout Christian compels one to accept as genuine every miracle claim that has been advanced any more than one has to reject all miracle claims or all miracle claims in a different religious tradition. If the world is not causally closed, then there may be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. With apologies to Hamlet.

Kathleen Noller: That’s a very good point. I’d like to touch back on the phrase, “when the natural world is left to itself.” So, you mentioned some Christians might have a few questions about that. Let’s just go down that road for a second for our listeners who might be confused by that phrase and say, “Well, is that a deistic God?” and sort of see how that fits with the God of the Bible.

Tim McGrew: Sure, so I think that what can make a very strong case is that God made creation with causal powers of its own. And of course, when you have an omnipotent being, everyone serves at his pleasure, right? If God gets completely fed up with his snail darters, then he can just take them out. It doesn’t take any difficulty on his part. It’s not like there’s some challenge to his power. However, the evidence that I believe we have is that God has made a natural world with causal powers running in causally regular ways. And unless something from outside that natural world intervenes in it—again, I’m not defining that as God yet; let’s just wait and see on the empirical side—it will continue to work its way out according to those regularities. And I don’t even think that definition treads on the toes of any particular interpretation of quantum mechanics. I didn’t say it’s a deterministic system. You know, it might be, it might not be. There might be a distributive lattice underneath all of the things that we’re unaware of. There might not be. If it is, it’s certainly non-local, yada, yada. We can go on with the quantum mechanic’s stuff. But really, I’m not trying to sort of take a stance on that issue. I think that the definition I’ve given is neutral between them. God created nature. Nature’s got certain ways it functions if it is not intervened with, interfered with. And this then permits us to do this investigation of nature, which on the whole I think is not interfered with. And that’s great.

Kathleen Noller: Okay. So, I think we’ve firmly established what we mean by miracle and what we mean by nature. The last definition I’d like to establish is that of either rational or reasonable, and also to discuss sort of what we’re arguing for here. Are we aiming to state that it is rational to believe that a miracle could occur or that it’s reasonable to believe that a particular miracle did occur? And is there different phrasing that you would prefer?

Tim McGrew: So let me start with a vocabulary issue. The way that I am using these things, I would use rational and reasonable as broadly synonymous. I’m not trying to invest them with any super-specialized meaning here.

Kathleen Noller: Sure.

Tim McGrew: And the way that I would get at what I’m trying to say when I use either of those terms is in terms of evidence. Now, you know, you invited me on this podcast. You get my views on it and not everybody will agree. Philosophers are a fractious bunch. You know, three philosophers in the room, five or six opinions. So, we’re going to go with mine though.

Kathleen Noller: Sorry.

Tim McGrew: And that is that there are some things that you can know immediately, not by inference. If I know that I have a headache, it’s not because I am staring in the mirror, I see my flushed face, my bloodshot eyes, the bottle of Tylenol clenched in my trembling hand. I’m aware of my headache in a more direct way than that. I don’t have to infer it the way you would infer it, which might leave you wondering, “Yeah, but maybe Tim is just a spectacularly good actor and he’s putting one over on me to avoid, you know, going in today or something.”

Kathleen Noller: Hahaha.

Tim McGrew: But beyond the things that we can know immediately, all the things that we are justified in believing, including all the things that count as knowledge, can be traced back, I would say, inferentially, to things that we can know without inference, things that we can know directly. Those are sometimes called foundations or basic beliefs. The inference relations do not have to be deductive, and I don’t think they generally are. Deductive inference—like proof in mathematics—is reserved for very, very special kinds of connections between premises and conclusion. But there are other sorts of inference relations, inference to the best explanation, for example, which I would model using probability. But this is, I think, a widely used but still maybe not adequately appreciated kind of inference. And I think that we use this tremendous amount. And I would say that much of what we unquestionably accept can, in principle, be traced via those kinds of explanatory relations back to the things of which we are fundamentally certain or foundationally certain. So, when I say someone is reasonable, what I mean is he’s got good reasons of the kind that corresponds to that. I don’t necessarily mean he can articulate them all. We’ve all had the experience of being quite sure something is true, but not being sure exactly at the moment how we got there. And we worry a little bit whether we’re being the subject of some kind of psychological trick, right, but sometimes we can trace it back. Do you have time for me to tell you a quick story on this?

Kathleen Noller: Absolutely.

Tim McGrew: So not a miracle story. This is a story from a time when I taught out in Washington state and I had gone across the Idaho panhandle to Moscow, Idaho. There’s a store I needed to go to. It was raining and dark and miserable outside and the parking lot wasn’t very full. I parked my car and got out of it, and in the direction opposite the direction of the store, there was a buzzing noise. And it could have been from a car that was a little distance out that way, or it could have been from a light post, which was considerably further away than that. I was not inclined to investigate. I turned my back on them both and went marching for the door of the store and was immediately profoundly convinced that the noise was coming from the light post and not from the parked car. Now my back is to both of them and I’m moving away from them and it was such an odd thing for me to be so certain of that I started introspecting, as a philosopher will do, even though I was no longer approaching them, looking at them. And here’s what I realized. The sound was not dropping off very fast. Now, I had, in those few strides, more than doubled my distance from the car. That was the nearer object. And it should have dropped off quite a bit by more than doubling the distance. But I hadn’t even close to doubled my distance to the light post, which was a great deal further away. And so the noise just wasn’t dropping off fast enough. And I was able to step aside and watch myself go by cognitively and catch myself there and realize I was responding to cues. But mercifully, we do almost all of this at a level that’s below the level of conscious awareness.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: I mean, I really don’t want you to try to process things out from first principles as you’re exiting the freeway. At least if you do, I don’t want my car anywhere near yours and you don’t want yours if I’m doing that, right?

Kathleen Noller: Going to make life real hard.

Tim McGrew: But so, a lot of this is handled without conscious effort and it must be for good function. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a structure. So, I’m persuaded that quite a bit of what we do rationally could be attributed to what we might call subconscious inference. And that’s not just a fuzzy thing. And I think that we can, in principle, get back to that. You know, I look out the window, I see trees and snow.

Tim McGrew: Don’t know how cold it is there. We’re in the middle of a very cold snap right here in Michigan.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah. That’s two.

Tim McGrew: But I look out there now. How can I see that not as trees and snow, but as patterns of color and light and shade? It might take some effort. Maybe I would have to work at, say, seeing things like an impressionist painter does. And yet, if I weren’t aware of the colors, the shapes, the light, the shade, I wouldn’t be aware of the trees and the snow. So I think, again, much of this happens subconsciously, but I am persuaded that there is such a thing as subconscious inference. And I think that’s very important. Maybe we can circle back to that later because people will ask, “Well, by your high standards, how can Grandma ever be justified in believing in God?” And I have things to say about Grandma. Grandma is shorter than we think.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, that’s a good point.

Tim McGrew: Anyway, sorry, that was my story. Go ahead.

Kathleen Noller: No, I love the story. So, let’s go through a little bit of history of objections towards miracles. So, in your Stanford Encyclopedia entry on miracles, you note that arguments against miracles generally fall into two categories.

Kathleen Noller: Either of those designed to show that miracles are impossible, or those designed to show that miracle claims could never be believable. So, I’d like to go through the history of these claims starting with the former. So, I pulled out the objections of philosopher Baruch Spinoza from the 1670s.

Kathleen Noller: And he argues in three steps, and I’m hoping you can take us through these. First, the will of God is identical with the laws of nature.

Tim McGrew: Okay.

Kathleen Noller: Second, a miracle is the violation of the laws of nature. Three, God’s will be inviolable, so miracles cannot happen. So how do you respond to this type of argument saying that miracles contradict God’s will as it relates to the natural world?

Tim McGrew: Right. So, Spinoza, what an interesting case. This is from his Tractatus. Spinoza is, I think, fighting in the teeth of opposition to reorient the entire structure of religious language so that it can all be reinterpreted and accepted by someone who doesn’t actually believe any of the traditional religious claims whatsoever, doesn’t believe in the existence of God, doesn’t believe in a world beyond nature. He’s not always interpreted that way, I’m well aware, but as I’m reading the Tractatus, I get the strong sense of somebody who wants to say, “Look, look, we’re all trying to get to the same thing. It’s just that you need to understand what you really mean by the laws of nature or by the will of God is just the laws of nature.” And then to say, “Oh, the laws of nature are sometimes violated by God” is to say that nature sometimes violates itself. That makes no sense. End of discussion. So that would be an impossibility argument. And the place that I would attack that first is just to say, who made up this definition of the will of God as being identical with the laws of nature? That is something that you can put forward as an attempt to explain why people say the things that they do about the will of God. But only after you have successfully argued that there is not, or very probably is not, a god at all. Then we reach for the sociological explanations of what people are doing. So, you’re no doubt familiar with C.S. Lewis’s very famous essay “Bulverism,” in which he says, “Hey, you know, we have this tendency that we think that we have explained something if we say, ‘Oh, you just say that because…’” And I think this is closely related: that Spinoza is doing this sort of high-handed redefinition of the terms and honestly, it never caught on with anyone who was sincerely religious because I think everyone who thought about it for four or five seconds said, “That’s not what I mean by the will of God.”

But so that’s just not—it’s a kind of a non-starter of an argument for me. But I really think Spinoza sincerely thought there’s a great deal of religious sentiment in the world. Spinoza, of course, found himself sort of between two worlds. He was Jewish, but was kicked out of synagogue. He had many Christian correspondents, but he wasn’t interested in Christianity per se. But he saw all these people using all this language and thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could sort of solve the problem by showing that somehow we had all been talking about the same thing all along?” Imagine how happy Richard Dawkins would be if Ayaan Hirsi Ali had simply said to him, “Richard, I still don’t believe in God in that sense. I just sort of think Christianity is a fabulous cultural idea.” He’d have been much happier than he was when she said, “No, I’m afraid I actually do believe it’s true.”

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew Does that make sense?

Kathleen Noller: But so yes, that makes sense. And I had a follow-up question to that. So, a little bit different than Spinoza’s argument, but what would you say to those who assert that miracles are evidence that God wasn’t a good enough creator or didn’t design the world well enough that he needed to step in and alter it?

Tim McGrew: Yeah, so I think the question that we must ask is, what are we envisaging God as optimizing? So, this is in part a question in speculative theology and it’s in part a question in optimization. If God is supposed from the outset to have been trying to set up a system that he would never interfere with, well, I suppose omnipotence can do this, but is that really something that we are entitled to say, ab initio, without going and looking at the evidence? You know, we have only one sermon written by Isaac Newton, and it’s preserved in the library at Cambridge. And in that sermon, what Newton says very curiously is, “God delights to be worshipped chiefly not for who he is, but for what he has done.” “I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of Egypt. You shall have no other gods before me.” And so, it’s reiterated repeatedly, and Newton had certainly read his Old Testament obsessively. And the point is that intervention in what is typically a system left to itself is the act of sovereignty. By what other means could God announce his presence? Spinoza says by none whatsoever. Okay, what would you know? What would you say of God that he’s the contemplative servant of the works of his own hands? He can no longer interfere with nature, nay, less than the weakest of his creatures. Right, I can mess around a little bit with the natural world. Here I am holding up a mug of coffee against the entire gravitational force of the planet.

Kathleen Noller: Aha!

Tim McGrew: Right. But God can’t do anything like that. No, no, no. Well, why think a thing like that? Why think that he was trying to optimize it so that he literally couldn’t announce his own presence? It’s not for his sake. It is for ours that God has made a world that he can break into. And notably, the central Jewish and Christian claims are claims that he has done exactly that, not wholesale, but at what I think C.S. Lewis called the great ganglia of history, the places where all the threads draw together. There are these things that come in clusters. And this is God announcing his presence. Nicodemus seems to understand this in John’s Gospel: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher sent from God, for no man can do the works you do unless God is with him.” So, it exceeds the power of any man to do these things. You must be a messenger sent from God. Well, you know, you got the point. You might not yet have got the point of the point, but you’re getting the point, right?

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: So, keep going, Nicodemus. I don’t think that he is misfiring there. I think he’s actually got his finger on something exactly right. And so, when we say, “Oh, it’s a mark of inadequacy,” inadequacy for what? If God wished to convey to us a message we desperately needed and wanted to do so in a way that reasonably, rationally we would be inexcusable for writing off as merely some kind of fine human philosophy or some exceptionally subtle working of nature, how could he break through to us except by intervening in the causal order which otherwise reigns, which otherwise holds? It is at once the sort of possibility of communication between God and man. And also, if I can borrow Tolkien’s phrase, it’s the opportunity for the greatest eucatastrophe, right? When things seem to be the worst possible, the night the darkest. This is when you need that ray of light breaking through. And if it has to break through from outside the system, so much the greater the eucatastrophe.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, absolutely. I love that quote as well. And what do you think of generally the sort of use of presuppositions about God’s character to inform scientific knowledge or findings about the natural world? Here we see, you know, somebody’s made a presupposition that God as a designer would design a world so perfect or so well ordered that he wouldn’t need to step in. I’ve seen other presuppositions—I forget who made this, but there’s one scientist or theologian maybe back in medieval times who presupposed that God would not create something that had imperfection in it, so he argued that the moon didn’t have craters on it. That the moon’s surface would be smooth, otherwise it wouldn’t fit with the idea of God as a designer. But then we have ideas too that are, you know, very fair presuppositions, like God as a creator. And so, we expect to see some elements of intelligent design in our universe. And so, as a philosopher, how do you see presuppositions like that applied to the natural world?

Tim McGrew: I think the best way for us to approach those is to hold with an open hand a whole variety of things as logically possible. But I think that the best principles for us to proceed by are those that can first be approached and examined by evidence. So, I don’t want to march in with an inviolable presumption about anything. I am happy to come to conclusions. I just don’t want to confuse them with premises. And if I think that, you know, my premises feel good to me, then to sort of walk in and not subject them to any kind of testing—that seems to me to be the wrong attitude. And it seems to me that it’s something that from the cognitive psychology angle, we realize we are all prone to do. Christians are prone to do it. Religious people who are not Christian are prone to do it.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: Atheists are prone to do it. Agnostics are prone to do it. We all have this tendency to come in with a strongly held belief and just not see the evidence that might tell against it, right? So, this confirmation bias, which is just sort of an active version, if you will, of the frequency illusion, where I just bought a Subaru and I see Subarus everywhere.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: Well, they were there already. They were all around me. I just wasn’t paying attention, right? Well, now I have a strongly held belief, and I see evidence for it everywhere. I don’t see the evidence against it. That’s a problem. It’s everybody’s problem. It’s a difficulty, not a cause of despair. I think there are things we can do about it. But if somebody says, “Oh, God wouldn’t do that,” part of me just wants to say, “Exactly how are you so sure what God would or would not do? Maybe you’ve got some evidence for it, and if so, tell me that.” And then let me see if I agree with you coming to that as the conclusion of a line of argument. But this is a reason that I really want to insist on separating data from inference. Again, to the extent that we can, I think that we want to have discussions where we find common ground. We can say to the reasonable skeptic, “Look, there are very old texts, which on our best rational reconstruction seem very clearly to be making these kinds of claims. We have some claims about who wrote them. We can make, you know, some kind of arguments about when, but we have the text. There’s a point for us to begin the discussion.” And if they won’t agree to that, you know, but what’s the old humorous song? “We never walked on the moon, Elvis isn’t dead.” And I mean, sometimes people are just too far out there, and all you can say is, “Hey, can I buy you a cup of coffee?” Right? There’s no more conversation to be had. But if they’re willing to at least make an effort to find the common ground where we can say, “OK, this much we’ll just agree that this is our data.”

And I might think that there you should admit more to the set of data than you are, but at least we can start there. At least we can have a conversation. So, assumptions like that can turn out to be supportable by data. They can turn out to be insupportable. No holidays from evidence, not for me, not for thee. Let’s just, you know, let’s walk in, sort it out, have the conversations. They will be better conversations if people are more intimately familiar with the evidence. We’d love to talk about that sometime. But I think that we should have them in an evidence-based way and we should ask people, “Look, you know, what is your explanation for the things that we both agree are facts?” And there should be give and take. Each person should have a chance to ask that of the other. It’s not about having a one-sided yelling session, but I think good conversations can occur when with goodwill we sit down and we say, “No, can we really sort this out?” And I’m not saying that everyone will persuade everyone else. That is mathematically impossible. I’m not even saying that half of us will persuade the other half. That’s just psychologically not going to happen. But it’s the best way to start conversations. And eventually, sometimes only on hindsight, people come back to those conversations and they say, “You know, that might have been the beginning of my changing my mind about something.” And that’s beautiful. We can’t always identify, but I think sometimes we can.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, I think many people, especially non-believers, will very much appreciate that evidence-based approach as well, and especially those who are, you know, I speak to a lot of folks who are scientists but, you know, very much entrenched in scientism, and that’s something that they can at least relate to. And we can sort of share the respective data on that side. This leads us to segue into the second argument on the believability of miracle claims. And so, this will be, I fear, the meat of our discussion on this historical response to miracles.

Tim McGrew: Yeah.

Kathleen Noller: David Hume’s on Miracles, where he states that, quote, “When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other, and according to the superiority which I discover, I pronounce my decision and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then and not till then can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.” So there are several proposed readings of Hume and of this passage. Can you take us through these and the key points and teach us how we should be reading Hume?

Tim McGrew: Yeah, the answer is how much time did you say you had? I can start, but this is a big subject. So, the big watershed in this is the answer one gives to the question, is Hume even trying to present an argument here?

Kathleen Noller: Yeah. Right here.

Tim McGrew: So, there is a line of thought, which I do not subscribe to, but it has its adherents, that says Hume isn’t making an argument here. He’s merely pointing out how high the bar is that you would have to clear in order to make it rational to believe in a miracle. And I suppose that there is a point to saying he just says, “When anyone tells me, if the falsehood would be more miraculous…” By the way, by more miraculous he means less probable. That’s just a little rhetorical flourish on his part. So, when he says, “I weigh the one miracle against the other,” he means I weigh the respective improbabilities. He wants to come out on the side with the lesser improbability on its side.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Tim McGrew: Now it turns out we can give a mathematical reconstruction of that, but if we do, then the mathematical equation by itself won’t settle the question of, well, where does the evidence lie? And in fact, some people, like Peter Bain, I believe, in responding to Hume just said, “Great, let’s do this.” Does Hume do this? Oh, Hume doesn’t actually do that. Hume doesn’t engage with the evidence at all. He seems to have thought that by even leveling this challenge, he was just graveling the whole religious establishment, and that does not follow at all. So, this is one of the reasons that George Campbell rather tartly says, “If you think you’re enlightened by this, you’re welcome to it, but it doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere.” On one reading it is just a tautology. Now an argument can be, as we say, elliptical, which is to say that it can have unstated premises and when you fill them in then you get the full argument. So, let’s try to combine this with his statement that the argument against a miracle is in the nature of the case as entirely as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined, all right? Okay, so if the case against a miracle is maximally strong, and if we’re weighing the case against it and the case for it, okay, then we know that that weighing is always going to come out in favor of the case against it. And so, it’s never going to be rational for us to believe that a miracle has occurred. No matter what the evidence, it’s never going to be rational. I really have a problem with saying something like that. It seems to me that if you’re going to say that you can never be rational in believing something, then that thing had better be a logical or a mathematical contradiction. I’m good with that, right? If you say to me, “There are square circles,” I’m going to say, “Euclidean, are we talking, or…” You say, “There are married bachelors.” Are you using terms loosely to make some kind of a joke here? Or do you literally mean bachelor? It’s good. If you literally mean bachelor, then the answer is no, there aren’t.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: So, the first thing that I want to do is just really ask a question: if there are within the realm of logically possible, then I think it’s a very, very bad idea to define ourselves into the impossibility of believing in them.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: That strikes me as something that we wouldn’t do in ordinary life if it were put to us that bluntly. It’s also the kind of thing that we would do in ordinary life without realizing it. I think one need only think of the profoundly fractured nature of political discourse in our country to realize so you could get people in the room who would have a great difficulty in agreeing on things that each of them thought were the most obvious facts in the world, much less on the interpretations of those facts. And so, yeah, you know, we do sometimes lock ourselves in these epistemic trapdoor scenarios or lobster pots, as I’ve seen them described, where you know you can get in, just can’t get out again. I really worry about that. I worry about that when I see Christians doing it. I worry about it when I see non-Christians doing it. Again, this is not a problem that one sides got a corner on. This is something that we see around us quite a bit, and I think we really need to say, “Hey, don’t do that. Don’t lock yourself off like that. Even if you are not holding your breath, you’re not…” You know, do you see a book on the paperback exchange shelf that says Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter? And you’re like, “Eh, no, I don’t believe it.”

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: And I don’t either, right? But you also should not absolutely say, “No matter what evidence they brought to me, I would never believe that. I would just refuse.” Well, I mean, I suppose they could bring evidence, but again, not holding my breath. But keep that little edge of openness to it because this is a high-stakes issue. This is not some kind of wrangle over the p-value in some set of experiments that somebody was trying to do and whether they really got a p-value this low or something, and I thought that might be interesting to a couple of specialists, but this is of high stakes to everybody.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: Right? Here we’re looking at this and we’re saying, okay, the fate of your immortal soul, if you have an immortal soul, could be hanging in the balance here. And so if it seems to you that this is not just wildly crazy, then it’s time to be earnest and not to shut yourself off from reasonable discussion if you can find people who seem reasonable to discuss it with you. So this question to miracles, since I take it that miracles and prophecy are the primary kinds of evidence Christians have appealed to throughout history, is a question that really can’t be evaded, and to the extent that we’re bringing assumptions to the discussion that could make it difficult or impossible for us to have reasonable discussions of these things, we need to stop that on both sides. Does that make sense?

Kathleen Noller: Yes, would you go so far as to say that it’s irrational to refuse to change your belief despite being encountered by a significant amount of evidence?

Tim McGrew: It can be. It’s going to depend on how much evidence you had for your original belief. So, there is a lot of nonsense surrounding the phrase, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And I do think sometimes it’s simply being used as an excuse to not look at whatever it is that you’ve got.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Tim McGrew: But at the same time, I want to be completely fair. If somebody comes to me and says that his uncle had a clean cancer scan, I’m going to say, “That’s great. That’s awesome.” If he comes to me and he says his uncle rose from the dead, I’m going to say, “Tell me more. I need you to—before I accept this…” So mundane events require less evidence than claims of supernatural intervention, partly because I think supernatural intervention is quite rare and should be if it’s designed as a sign, if it’s designed to get our attention. It shouldn’t be the kind of thing that we can show off and say, “Yeah, turning water into wine, but there are Sherpas up in the Himalayas who can do that too, so you know, small percentages, but he was probably just one of those guys.” No, no, actually nobody can do that. That’s not a thing that we can just write off as a rare but wholly natural sort of event we’re already familiar with. So…

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: Anyway, I don’t mean to belabor that, but I really do think that the key point is that people should come to these discussions saying, “I have certain views. I even have a certain amount of evidence for the views that I have. If you can, however, provide me with enough evidence, and I know that I need to be listening to the little bits of evidence, because very frequently, the way that we learn we’re wrong is not that there’s one spectacular result that just turns everything on its head, but it’s that there are a lot of little clues that are pointing towards something we don’t believe.” And then there are two dangers. One is that we won’t notice the clues at all because they’re little. No one of them compels a change in view. The other danger is that we’ll notice them and immediately, contemptuously dismiss them because they’re small. But just like little vectors can add up into a big vector, if enough of them are pointing in the same direction, so little pieces of evidence can mount up and can mount up quite spectacularly, actually. And that’s something that I work on in my life as a probability theory guy, but no, we won’t take your listeners there unless you want us to. But that is, it’s an important point that even small pieces of evidence that all converge in a common center, so to speak, may draw us in a direction we never expected to go by their cumulative force. And no one of them has to be spectacular. No one of them has to be amazing in order for them to mount up to a very strong cumulative case.

Kathleen Noller: Yes. And I think it goes back to your earlier point that the stakes are very high. And so it may not be worth your time investigating the evidences behind, for example, your uncle’s clean cancer scan, but it would be very well worth your time investigating the evidences behind a miraculous claim that if it were true would mean that that uncle was a spiritual being or a God or something crazy was happening that would alter your worldview.

Tim McGrew: Oh boy, you guys just said that we can investigate all kinds of supernatural claims. All right, where do you begin? I bet you want to begin with your favorite one, don’t you? But how about all the other ones? Because that’s a natural enough question. And I think it deserves a rational answer. And so even if it poses a gotcha, I think that it would behoove us to look at it soberly and to see what can be done. Because I will tell you just from my point of view, and again, I speak here for no one but myself, I approach the Jewish and the Christian scriptures initially as someone with historical curiosity. And it is just not true from a historical point of view that every aspect of them, every story related, even every miracle story related, has an equal amount of evidence behind it. That doesn’t mean that I’m saying, “Oh, then you know the ones that don’t have as much evidence must be false,” because they do interlock to a certain extent. But man, if I wanted to investigate one claim and it’s like, “This, this is the make or break,” I would not choose Elisha and the floating axe head. That’s just not where I would start. So, we do need, I think, some criteria—not for settling the question, “Well then, that was nonsense,” but for answering the more subtle question: if I really wanted to investigate this in view of the plethora of claims that there are out there, where should I begin?

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: How should I be approaching various miracle claims in order not to get lost in the great forest of claims, if some of them are more plausible and some less so, if there are reasons at least to wonder about some of them, how can I get my hands on those so that I don’t end up just disappearing into the details and never being heard from again?

Kathleen Noller: Yes, let’s start with those criteria. And I think our listeners would love to hear both positive criteria to not determine if a miracle definitively has occurred, but to perhaps increase our confidence or likelihood that it’s occurred, and then also the negative criteria that we can use to filter out those massive amount of miracle claims that are across time, culture, different religions that we all know are out there.

Tim McGrew: For the positive side, the place I would like to go first would be to somebody we don’t read much these days, but his name is Charles Leslie. And he gives a criteriological argument, and I think we can reconstruct it in a way that’s even better than the way Leslie himself puts it. But basically, he says, you may safely believe a historical claim if it meets four criteria: that the matters of fact attested in that be such as men’s outward senses, their eyes and their ears may be judges of it; that it be done publicly in the face of the world; that not only public monuments be kept up in memory of it, but some outward actions to be performed; and that such monuments and such actions or observances be instituted and commenced from the time that the matter of fact was done. So, what Leslie is trying to do here is he’s trying to rule out two different kinds of criticism. One is, “Oh, that was just something that fooled people at the time that the claim was put forward. But really, it was such a thing that they could have been easily fooled.” And he says, not if it’s done publicly, not if it’s the kind of thing that the senses can get a grip on. The other two are designed to assure us that it’s not something that was claimed merely long after the fact. So, if I said to you, “Hey, Kathleen, what’s your family doing for Stupendous Day?”

Kathleen Noller: Sure.

Tim McGrew: And you look at me like, “For what?” And it’s Stupendous Day, right? I mean, it’s been a national holiday for hundreds of years. Surely your family celebrates Stupendous Day. And you’re like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tim.” Okay, what am I trying to do? I’m trying to pull it over on you by inventing a fake holiday and pretending that we’ve all known about it all along.

Kathleen Noller: Look.

Tim McGrew: And of course, we can’t. There’s no record that there was any such thing observed at the time to which I’m referring, and for centuries afterward, in fact, until right up until now when I just made it up. So, it would be very hard for me to convince you that Stupendous Day has always been celebrated. So, Leslie’s criteria give us a way of distinguishing things that have characteristics that make it hard to write them off either as impositions at the time or as fabrications much later. And so, take the death of Christ, just as a very simple example. We have record of the Christians celebrating the Lord’s Supper from right in the first century, because back to our first documentation of these things. Take the resurrection. Now here’s a funny thing. At the beginning in Jerusalem, the first Christians were almost exclusively devout Jews, and yet in the letters of Paul, in the Revelation of St. John, you find clear references not only to Sunday or the first day of the week as the day when they are congregating for worship, but also to the calling of that the Lord’s Day. What could be the explanation for their doing that? Leslie says this is a historical celebration dating from the event said to have occurred that, he doesn’t put it quite this way, but I would say it can be best explained and perhaps only satisfactorily explained by something spectacular happening that would make devout Jews say, “You know, we might go to synagogue on Sabbath, but we’re meeting among ourselves on the Lord’s Day.”

That’s just tremendously important. Why is that tremendously important to them? Clearly it is. So that’s the kind of memorial that I think Leslie has in view. So that’s on the positive side. And there’s a whole sort of history of discussion of this argument, which is quite fascinating. I do some of this in my Stanford Encyclopedia article. But on the negative side, I really like a book by John Douglas called The Criterion, where he is trying to offer criteria for distinguishing between miracle claims which there is significant reason to doubt even if they’re true—there’s a reason to doubt—and those that don’t afford us those reasons for doubt. So, Douglas puts forward three criteria. And if a miracle claim fails on any of these criteria, then there is a reason to doubt it. The first one is: is it first announced at the time that it said to have occurred, or only much, much later? So, a distance in time. Well, yeah, the Roman historian Tacitus in his Annals, book 15, chapter 44, talks about Christianity as having arisen from the death of the leader of the Christians and “the superstition, thus checked for a moment, sort of flared up again and spread all the way from Jerusalem even to Rome.” So here you’ve got clearly a hostile witness. He thinks this is some kind of crackpot superstition. But he’s testifying at the time—not. So he’s talking about the memory of people in Rome then because he said to go on to talk about Nero’s fixing the guilt for the burning of the slums and part of the non-slums in Rome onto the Christians and he says there’s a great deal of sympathy for them because it seemed that the tortures inflicted upon them were not for any guilt of theirs but just to glut one man’s cruelty.

You need to remember he was a young student in Rome in the 60s of the first century, so within a decade of those very events about which he’s writing. And when he talks to us about the origins of Christianity, there’s no reason to believe that he’s relying on Christian sources. So, there’s that time thing. Second criterion, we want to know: was the first proclamation of this made in the location, the place where these kinds of things were alleged to have taken place, or were they far, far away in a distant country where you know travel is hard and we hear rumors, we can’t go check on them? And so, travel around the rim of the Mediterranean and the Roman world was very well known. People did it all the time. Josephus says 3 million people a year came to Jerusalem for the Passover.

If he’s exaggerating and it was only an order of magnitude less, just 300,000 people a year, that’s a lot of people. That’s a really big influx of people. And so, what we’re looking at is a world where travel may have been hard by the standards we’re accustomed to, but people did it all the time. Ships going back and forth across the Mediterranean. Time of year made a big difference, but if it was a good time of year, you went to the festival. You know, if you’re close enough, you’d do the overland route. If you’re not, you’d go to Caesarea Maritima and get off there and then come across into Jerusalem. But this is not too difficult to do. So that’s fine. But like if we said something happened in the Indian subcontinent, now that would be comparatively much less accessible. That kind of travel wasn’t being done there. So that’s the second criterion that Douglas uses. The third one, though, is maybe the most important default, and that is: would it have been allowed to pass the claim of a miracle without investigation? Because of, say, the social context in which it took place. Well, it was sort of falling in line with the predispositions of a large number of people. Because if it would, then the fact that people said it, the fact that people said it in the place and at the time doesn’t carry as much weight for us if they would have been disinclined to give it a raised eyebrow and a bit of a critical investigation. And so here, again, the resurrection just stands out. This is a claim that was made in the place within 50 days of the execution of the leader of the nascent Christian movement by the cooperation of both the religious and the civil authorities. It’s not going to fly to say, “Oh, yeah, well, some of the people would have loved them for saying heroes from the dead, and other people would have said, ‘Hold it, I’m a bit skeptical of you.’” No, that wasn’t what it was at all. It was a much more radical environment than that. So those three criteria provide us a filter. And what Douglas says is, look, if you’re looking for a place to start, if you want to know where the most plausible miracle claims are, look for things that pass those three criteria first, then we can talk. And it turns out that a whole bunch of these claims don’t pass those criteria. That includes some of the Judeo-Christian miracle claims. That doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. It does mean they are not promising places to start the investigation.

Kathleen Noller: I’m going to draw

Tim McGrew: And so that, I think, is Douglas’s brilliant, beautiful contribution to this discussion is to say, look, really, we should be looking for the ones that at least pass these three. And then we can talk. And it doesn’t mean that they’re true if they do pass. It doesn’t mean they’re false if they don’t. But it helps us to sort the more plausible places to begin from the less, which means it’s not impossible to approach this question in a topic-neutral way. You’ll notice none of the criteria—not the criterion of time or place or a hostile context—is directed toward the content of any particular religious tradition or any particular religious claim.

These are topic-neutral criteria. And that’s very much what we want. We don’t want something that says, “Well, you know, do you believe in the rainbow body theory of the Buddhist monks? Why are you asking me that? Present me with some evidence, let’s talk.” No, I need to know whether you believe it first. Well, that’s—this is not topic-neutral and it’s not helping. So that’s one of the reasons I think Douglas is so important and deserves to be better known. He wrote during Hume’s lifetime. So, Hume was still alive at the time, like Hume didn’t die until 1776. So, Douglas and William Adams and George Campbell, John Leland, all wrote during Hume’s own lifetime and very ably interacted with him. And I think that what they gave us was gold. I wish more people in the apologetics world would pay attention to what we have there because sometimes these older writers just approach things in a very rational fashion.

Kathleen Noller: Do you have any idea how many miracles have passed both those negative criteria and the positive criteria?

Tim McGrew: Very few. I once asked this question in front of a mixed audience of Christians and atheists in a debate, which you can find online down in Texas. I hadn’t really intended to do a debate, but I told my friend Ezra, “I’ll do anything you guys need me to do.” And before I knew it, I was wound up to do debates like, “Oh, great, here we are.” But somebody in the Q&A afterwards said he had a Hindu miracle claim that met all of these criteria. And I said, “That’s great. Don’t run away afterwards. I want that. I want to get that.” So I tracked him down afterwards, it took me a little bit of effort, but I did find him. And I said, “So what’s the source?” He said, “Well, I read it in a book.” I said, “Do you remember the title of the book?” “Well, no, he didn’t remember the title.” I said, “What can you tell me about the book? Maybe I can find it.” “Well, it was a children’s book that my Hindu parents gave me.”

Well, bummer, right? I was really looking forward to investigating it, and I would have, but that was it. That was all he gave me. Oh, in a children’s book, it’s, you know. So, we’re not looking for someone to claim that something meets these. We’re looking to see whether we’ve got credible evidence that something does pass these filters at the outset. And at that point, then we could roll up our sleeves and get digging. We’re not merely looking for someone to claim that they passed them. And so, you know, different conversations will go different ways. Some people will come to a discussion of Christianity with an attitude towards the New Testament so skeptical that they’ll really be resistant to even taking seriously the idea that these claims were made when the witnesses were still alive. “Surely not.” It’s the “surely” that causes me to lift an eyebrow. I think sometimes there’s sort of an unspoken idea that if they had been made at the time when the witnesses were still alive, that would be good evidence, and we can’t have that now, can we? So, yeah, you know, one learns to sense the nuances in some of these objections, but the conversations might continue anyway.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, yes, absolutely, and it’s so important to continue those conversations, continue the relationship. And I think another misunderstanding too that I hear a lot is related to the negative criterion that you want to rule out a miracle if an opinion has been already established, and that a lot of folks think that it’s really common for world religions to be founded on evidence of a miracle.

Tim McGrew: Right.

Kathleen Noller: And so, I think a lot of folks in the West see Mormonism and Christianity and think that that must be extrapolated into other religions. Is that true? And are there other world religions that you know of that were founded on the evidence of a miracle?

Tim McGrew No it’s very rare for a new religion to be founded on a miracle claim. Certainly, Islam was not. In fact, very famously in the Quran, Muhammad says, “You’re not going to get a miracle. You’ve had miracles for the other religions of the book already. That’s all you’re going to get.” Shrewd move if you don’t have it to give them. Now, you know, you talk to a devout Muslim today and there’s a certain amount of retconning of this and they’ll tell you, “Oh, the Quran itself is a miracle.” Well, why is it a miracle? Right? Well, it’s just so majestic and so amazing. Be more specific. Tell me, tell me why. Well, you can’t tell that unless you can read Arabic. Which most of them don’t read well enough to be able to do this anyway, but you can understand why this is beginning to turn disappointing, right?

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Tim McGrew: There’s also a scene in the Quran where Muhammad splits the moon in half and then the halves come together, but the splitting of the moon occurs in a sequence which is clearly identified as a dream. And so, by Leslie’s criteria that something must be done openly in the face of the world, men’s outward senses can be the judges of it, nope, nope, nope, not happening.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Tim McGrew: So, it is actually very easy to support a false miracle claim with the help of an established religion. But it’s quite difficult to promote a new and manufactured religion by the help of a faulty miracle claim. Something quite interesting from the history of Great Britain—I don’t know if many people know that this happened—just before Hume’s birth, so very early 1700s, there was a group of self-styled prophets that came over from France, the Camisards, they were called. And at one point, they proclaimed that a certain leader of theirs who had died was going to rise from the dead on a stated day the next spring. Dr. Thomas Emes would be raised from the dead, dress himself in his accustomed manner, and deliver a homily. Well, a mob showed up with pitchforks and they were rowdy and they were like waiting for Thomas Emes to rise from the dead. I regret to inform you Thomas Emes did not rise from the dead. There were all kinds of excuses that were made for this, but it’s, you know, there are cases where people have tried to be specific in a hostile context. It doesn’t go over very well. So it’s not the case that, “Oh, anybody could do that and get away with it,” right? I mean, you—but the more hostile the context, the better. If you want to start a religion of your own, you’re going to travel along the path trod by L. Ron Hubbard and you’re going to make up your own Scientology. You’re even a scientist. Maybe you can get away with this. And if I offered to buy you a one-way ticket to a place for you to try to persuade people of your new religion, I will pay your transportation to Minneapolis or I will pay your transportation to Mecca. Which one are you going to pick? Minneapolis, you might have success, you might not have success. And try to go to Mecca, you’ll be dead before you hit baggage claim. You’re not allowed in there. The hostile context makes an enormous difference to how receptive people are going to be to anything new. And that’s why it’s so important that we keep our eye on that. And when people bring up claims, “Oh, here’s a miracle story. Here’s a miracle story.” We apply Douglas’s filters and we ask ourselves, is this a plausible place to start? Or is there some prima facie reason to be worried already? Again, that’s not ruling out the possibility. It might be true anyway, but it’s not a great place to start if right up front there’s a red flag or two.

Kathleen Noller: So, we’ve talked about a lot of physical miracles and there are a lot of physical miracles in the Catholic Church as well: levitation, healing. What about visions that don’t subvert any laws of nature but are nonetheless remarkable? Can we even call those miracles?

Tim McGrew: I don’t have a one-size-fits-all story to sell you on this. I think if the content of the alleged visions contradicts things that we have excellent reason to believe are true, you know, that we have well-rounded, then I think that is, in the nature of the case, a good reason to reject the visions as coming from any veridical source. But visions don’t have to come from God. You know, if I believe in a natural world that is not causally closed, it doesn’t mean that everything outside of it is truth and goodness and beauty and “Oh, would not deceive me.”

So, I have a richer concept of what that can entail than simply, “Oh, if it’s a vision, real vision must have come from God.” Maybe not. That doesn’t seem to me to be obvious at all. So I am a naturally somewhat skeptical kind of person. And my first response to a claim like that is to quote an eyebrow and to say, “I’m going to have to hear a good deal more.” At the same time, I need to take some of my own medicine. I don’t want to be so implacably closed to the possibility that I couldn’t be persuaded if there were actually really good evidence. But in the nature of the case, I worry that if someone says, “I had a private vision,” and it doesn’t tie down in any respect to anything that can be checked, right? I mean, that’s hard. If somebody has a vision and tells me the details of some as-yet future and highly contingent event and then is borne out, I might be very interested. And if they can do this again and again, I might be rocked. That is the kind of evidence that could in principle be very profound epistemically. But if they’re simply saying, “Oh, you know, Chinese fortune cookie time, something wonderful is about to happen. Your life will change.” Everybody’s life is changing, right? You know, cynic Tim comes in and says, “Wait, stop, what are you doing here? This is not sounding like an authoritative word from a source that I must acknowledge.” You know, if there’s really a God who is the creator of the universe and is good and loving and gave his son to die for me, that I need to pay absolute attention to what he’s saying. This one not so clear. I like what Thomas Aquinas says about this. He says, when someone brings me a message from my sovereign, I am not entitled to sit in judgment of my sovereign. I am, however, absolutely entitled and indeed required to sit in judgment on the criteria that it is in fact a message from my sovereign. And I think that hits exactly the right note. My door is always open for truth, but I happen to know that quite a few imposters come through. And so I don’t just let anybody wander in without stopping and checking their affidavits. I need to know if a supposed prophetic word or message comes from a source that I should be accepting. And if I can’t authenticate it, then I think we ought to believe better of the goodness of God than that he would demand of us to receive things which we had done our best to test and could not. I mean, Paul himself says, “Test everything, hold on tightly to what is good.” And the “test everything” part is a very important part of that.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, that’s a very important piece of it. And so, on that note, let’s test some of the Catholic miracles together and discuss some of these. This is something that I hear a lot in apologetic contexts. I’m a Protestant, and so I get asked a lot why I don’t believe in the Catholic miracles. And the ones that I most often get asked about are the Eucharistic miracles and the healing miracles at Lourdes in France. For those who don’t know, the transubstantiation Catholic teaching holds that the bread and the wine that’s blessed by priests during Mass transform into the body and blood of Jesus. So, the Eucharistic miracles oftentimes: a priest will, it’s a very similar story, a priest will find a host, which is the blessed piece of bread, on the ground after Mass. And so, per procedure, they’ll place it into a container of water, place it in a safe, and then they’ll come to open the safe later. They have a very specific procedure to, I don’t know if they dispose of these, but to handle them after they’ve been blessed. And then in some of these occasions, they found a red substance on the host. And so, one of these from a church in Poland in 2013 has records that they left it to dry. They took it to pathologists at the medical university to take a look at it. They did histology under it, so they looked at it under the microscope and stained it to look for tissue. And they allegedly found something that appeared to be cardiac tissue or skeletal muscle tissue interwoven with the bread. So, the interwovenness, they said, meant that it wasn’t tampered with. It wasn’t just added after the fact. And so, I’ve looked at, I’ve tried to look at this evidence. And I’m not—I won’t say anything yet. I will just see what you think about things like this and sort of how you handle these as a fellow Protestant.

Tim McGrew: We have reports, facially from credentialed pathologists, saying that there is cardiac muscle tissue interwoven with the matter of the bread in the sample that was brought. So, the first thing to do would be to look and see if in fact we those things have, but for the sake of the argument I’m going to accept that we do. Classic Catholic teaching about transubstantiation is actually contradicted by that. Transubstantiation is something that takes place, according to traditional Catholic teaching, to the substance of the Eucharist, but not to its accidents, not to its surface properties, which are the properties that we can investigate. It becomes in substance the body and blood of Christ, but in its accidental properties, it remains indistinguishable from bread and wine. So that contradicts Catholic teaching.